Month: March 2016

Be strong. Have each other’s backs. Defend every target of demonizing right-wing rhetoric threatening our allies and those facing oppression or repression. Leave no one behind: build a society where no one is thrown under the bus or out of the lifeboat. Take time for yourself and those close to you. Let the next generation grow into leaders. Pass it forward so that the circle remains unbroken.

In our view, this backlash character stamped the Reconstruction-era Klan movement as the United States’ first significant right-wing populist movement. To take the point a step further, the Klan was not simply an oppositional pressure group but rather an extralegal counterrevolutionary force literally at war with the established government. In the United States no other significant right-wing movement would adopt this insurgent strategy until sections of the neonazi movement did so in the 1980s.

The Klan, and the wider movement to “redeem” the South, also introduced a new ideological theme into U.S. politics. This was the theme of collective rebirth after a nearly fatal crisis—what Roger Griffin has labeled a myth of “palingenesis,” from the Greek word meaning rebirth.

In the twentieth century, as Griffin has emphasized, palingenesis has been central to the ideology of fascism, whose “mobilizing vision is that of the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.”[i] (This also replicates a prophetic theme from apocalyptic Christian narratives of the final battle between good and evil.) In the United States up until 1860, no part of the White racial caste had experienced a crisis such as Griffin describes.

But the re-imposition of racial oppression in the South, after total military defeat and the “barbarism” of Radical Reconstruction, seemed to White supremacists a phoenix-like rebirth indeed.

Since Reconstruction, this palingenetic myth has provided White supremacists a model for interpreting and addressing other crises in the racial order. That is part of the reason the Ku Klux Klan, unlike many other racist organizations of the nineteenth century, has been revived again and again. And in the twentieth century the Klan myth of collective rebirth helped prepare the ground for the spread of fascist doctrines.

Middle Class Right-Wing Populism as Core Element of Fascism

Fascism is a complex political current that parasitizes other ideologies, includes many internal tensions and contradictions, and has chameleon-like adaptations based on the specific historic symbols, icons, slogans, traditions, myths, and heroes of the society it wishes to mobilize. In addition, fascism as a social movement often acts dramatically different from fascism once it holds state power. When holding state power, fascism tends to be rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, and elitist. As a social movement fascism employs populist appeals against the current regime and promises a dramatic and quick transformation of the status quo.In interwar Europe there were three distinct forms of fascism, Italian economic corporatist fascism (the original fascism), German racial nationalist Nazism, and clerical fascism exemplified by religious/nationalist movements in Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and the Ukraine, among others.

Right-wing populism can act as both a precursor and a building block of fascism, with anti-elitist conspiracism and ethnocentric scapegoating as shared elements. The dynamic of right-wing populism interacting with and facilitating fascism in interwar Germany was chronicled by Peter Fritzsche in Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. Fritzsche showed that distressed middle-class populists in Weimar launched bitter attacks against both the government and big business. This populist surge was later exploited by the Nazis which parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism.

===”The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle-class constituents and at the same time advocated a strong and resolutely anti-Marxist mobilization….Against “unnaturally” divisive parties and querulous organized interest groups, National Socialists cast themselves as representatives of the commonweal, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public….[b]reaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least rhetorically the populist ideal of the people’s community…”

This populist rhetoric of the Nazis, focused the pre-existing “resentments of ordinary middle-class Germans against the bourgeois ‘establishment’ and against economic and political privilege, and by promising the resolution of these resentments in a forward-looking, technologically capable volkisch ‘utopia,'” according to Fritzsche.

As Umberto Eco explains, however, the populist rhetoric of fascism is selective and illusive:

===”individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is a theatrical fiction….There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People….Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell…Fascism.”

Fritzsche observed that “German fascism would have been inconceivable without the profound transformation” of mainstream electoral politics in the 1920’s “which saw the dissolution of traditional party allegiances.” He also argued that the Nazis, while an electorally-focused movement, had more in common rhetorically and stylistically with middle class reform movements than backwards looking reactionary movements. So the Nazis as a movement appeared to provide for radical social change while actually moving its constituency to the right.

The success of fascist movements in attracting members from reformist populist constituencies is due to many complex overlapping factors, but key factors are certainly the depth of the economic and social crisis and transformation of, and the degree of anger and frustration of those who see their demands not being met. Desperate people turn to desperate solutions.